Allegro in G minor, K.312 [c.1789]

Menuett in D major, K.355 [c.1789]

Sonata movement in G minor, K. Appendix 109b, No.3 [c.1764]

Nothing written by Mozart in his maturity is negligible. Taking into account only the piano music composed during the last fifteen years of his life, there are a dozen or more pieces which are consistently neglected even so. They are neglected not so much because they are uninteresting or insignificant but rather because, being neither sonatas nor variations, they are difficult to fit into recital programmes - and the shorter they are the more difficult. One solution is to make a selection of them, as Dmitri Bashkirov has done on this occasion, and arrange them in a coherent group.

The Allegro in G minor has all the characteristics of a first movement of a sonata. It is not entirely clear when it was written or for what immediate purpose but the likelihood is that it results from Mozart’s visit to the court of the cello-playing Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia in Berlin in the spring of 1789. Certainly, Mozart told Michel Puchberg in July of that year that he was “composing six easy clavier sonatas for Princess Friederike and six quartets for the King” and he did complete what are now known as his three “Prussian” Quartets within the next twelve months. As for the sonatas for the Princess, however - unless the far from easy Sonata in D major, K.576, was intended for her - the project seems to have progressed no further than this Allegro first movement. Its conspicuously plain textures and modest figuration combine with the G minor tonality to give the piece a peculiarly lean quality precluding any hope of a happy ending in the major.

Although the Menuett in D major was clearly not conceived for the same work as the Allegro in G minor, it could, it has been suggested, have been written for the Sonata in D major, K.576, in 1789 and then - perhaps to comply with the three-movement sonata convention - withdrawn. However that may be, it is one of the most inspired of all Mozart’s minuets. The sensuous chromaticism of its main theme is effectively offset, on the one hand, by the apparently artless harmonies of its companion and, on the other hand, by the extraordinary dissonances of the short but turbulent middle section.

The key of G minor had such a consistently stimulating effect on Mozart’s imagination that there is no incongruity in closing this group with a piece he wrote as long as twenty-five years before the other two. Included in the notebook compiled during the fifteen months the Mozart family spent in London, when the composer was no more than eight or nine, it is a prophetic little work. While it would be an exaggeration to claim it as an anticipation of the Molto allegro of the late Symphony in G minor, in its persistent use of ostinato and its emphatic rhythms at what is evidently intended to be a high speed (there is no tempo marking in the original), it surely derives from a similarly dramatic creative impulse.